At home, Professor Emeritus Tadeusz Grygier works in a spacious office full of commemorative plaques. It is his “trophy room”, an appropriate metaphor for a man who, in the face of obstacles and oppression, has managed to overcome challenges and come out on top.
Professor Grygier was born in Warsaw in 1915. His mother, a psychiatrist, and his father, a surgeon, quickly initiated young Tadeusz into the ways of science.
A scientist, psychologist, philosopher, yachtsman and storyteller, Professor Grygier is also founder of the University of Ottawa’s Department of Criminology. In 1967, while teaching at the University of Toronto, he was awarded a grant by the Government of Ontario which tasked him with creating an institute of criminology at the University of Ottawa.
He quickly had to assemble a team of professors and specialists, and enrol students. He obtained the names of two retired police officers on whom he could rely from the Commissioner of the RCMP. One of these became his executive assistant in charge of administering the program, and the other took part in simulations with students. While commonplace today, this learning strategy was innovative at the time.
“I liked to fill in when a professor was away,” says Grygier. “It gave me a chance to measure the program’s success. My multidisciplinary training and fondness for statistics helped me a lot during this period.”
President Roger Guindon had also invited Professor Grygier to sit on a committee tasked with creating the new Faculty of Management Sciences.
Grygier loves the law and became a lawyer at age 21, though his natural curiosity – and destiny – led him down a different path. He is an accomplished athlete, with achievements in skiing, horseback riding and sailing. In 1938, he was chosen to represent Poland in the Olympic Games before the war changed everything.
In 1940, he was sent to a concentration camp in the Arctic republic of Komi. When he questioned the legal basis for his arrest, the arresting officer told him, “You’re going to work hard for us, and die like a dog from hunger and cold. That’s your legal basis.”
Professor Grygier survived his time in the gulag thanks to a transformative strategy. “When I was a prisoner,” he says, “I refused to assume the role of victim. Instead, I redefined myself: I would be a researcher, observing humanity and the perverse effects of oppression.” The psychologist would later apply this strategy of positive redefinition to his patients, and the professor would apply it to his students.
It was during his time in the gulag that Grygier began planning his doctoral thesis. First published in 1954, Oppression: A Study in Social and Criminal Psychology has since been published four times and appeared on the Routledge list of “major publications”.
Some 50 years later, Professor Grygier is still writing. In 2002 he published Exile: The Road to Knowledge, a book that recalls the first milestones of his life. He is currently working on a study of personality as defined by mind, heart and free will.
One thing is certain: retirement has not diminished Professor Grygier’s intellectual curiosity.
